Sorry for the excessive number of question marks. As you can tell, I'm more excited than a 13-year-old who just got his first internet access.

Anyway, today I bought my first Polish textbook. As I was reading the introduction, I came upon something that overwhelmed me with joy. I was so happy that I was about to cry. It said, right there, that Polish, for the most part, has FIXED STRESS! For me, this is such a relief, having endured the unpredictability of the Russian stress pattern, only to find out that there is a language that is just as grammatically challenging as Russian, if not more so, yet with no weird stress patterns. Anyway, what I'm trying to ask actually is, as far as Polish goes, how frequent does the "unfixed" stress occur in Polish? I know uniwErsitet is one of them, and I would surmise that it is mostly foreign words that do not follow the Polish stress pattern.

Second, as I understand, the stress falls on the penultimate syllable normally, yes? So, in Polish they would say Pokoj (sorry, the kreska isn't working here for some reason) as opposed to Pokoj, right? That's how I understood it (sorry, today was my first encounter with Polish, so forgive the newbish questions).

While I wrote this post partly because I was wondering about the stress, it was mainly the fact that I just want to stand here and sing in joy to the world that I have finally found a Slavic language with fixed stress!

*Jumps around in excitement*

P.S. If you were ever to hear my spoken Russian, I think you'll laugh at how often I misplace the stress. Just today, I found out that it was удалось and not удалось, so, you see how even after I studied Russian for quite some time, stress in Russian truly жить мешает, especially when it's a Russian language learner.